Fuzzy Evaluation of Crowd Safety Based on Pedestrians’ Number and Distribution Entropy

Crowd video monitoring and analysis is a hot topic in computer vision and public management. The pre-evaluation of crowd safety is beneficial to the prediction of crowd status to avoid the occurrence of catastrophic events. This paper proposes a method to evaluate crowd safety based on fuzzy inference. Pedestrian’s number and distribution uniformity are considered in a fuzzy inference system as two kinds of attributes of a crowd. Firstly, the pedestrian’s number is estimated by the number of foreground pixels. Then, the distribution uniformity of a crowd is calculated using distribution entropy by dividing the monitoring scene into several small areas. Furthermore, through the fuzzy operation, the fuzzy system is constructed by using two input variables (pedestrian’s number and distribution entropy) and one output variable (crowd safety status). Finally, inference rules between the crowd safety state and the pedestrian’s number and distribution uniformity are constructed to obtain the pre-evaluation of the safety state of the crowd. Three video sequences extracted from different scenes are used in the experiment. Experimental results show that the proposed method can be used to evaluate the safety status of the crowd in a monitoring scene.